What emerged from a series of meetings that followed that initial, tense meet up was a collaborative framework that has shifted K-C’s sourcing standards and helped offer both organizations a tangible way to move forward on protecting and conserving forests worldwide.

Today, K-C reports a significant increase in its FSC-certified fiber use and notes higher sales across its Kleenex and Scott tissue brands.

The questions were flying in even before we started keeping the panelists busy through the hour and more: from a behind-the-scenes story about how the two began collaborating five years ago to the future of alternative fibers and how the organizations are working on connecting consumers with sustainability, we covered a lot of ground.

Join CSRwire’s Editorial Director Aman Singh in conversation with Stephen Jordan, Executive Director of the U.S. Chamber Business Civic Leadership Center and a group of MBA graduates virtually for an intimate conversation about what happened in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in 2011 and what the field has in store for 2012.

The 2012 CSR Outlook is the first in a FREE six-part forum series being conducted by the Center. The U.S. Chamber BCLC’s Conversations with Stephen series is produced and moderated by founder and executive director Stephen Jordan. Guests engage in thoughtful, solution-oriented discussions and debates about the CSR field. The six-part 2012 series is offered at no charge as part of BCLC’s commitment to share knowledge and best practices with current and upcoming CSR practitioners.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,500 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

While I won’t bore you with the stats, here are the top three winners of 2011:

Certainly not the blog post I planned on writing after spending two weeks in New Delhi, India but I am compelled.

Today, McDonald’s hosted a Twitter chat with VP of CSR Bob Langert. The motivations are many for a company that is besieged for its product line and constantly under fire.

In fact, last year at a diversity benchmarking event at Hamburger University, I had the opportunity to hear the McDonald’s executive team discuss a whole host of business practices and strategies, including diversity (led by Global Chief Diversity Officer Pat Harris), employee learning and corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Here’s a snapshot of what I wrote then:

There is an argument that some companies–such as those that deal in weapons and tobacco–just can’t do corporate responsibility in a meaningful way. As a result, they are often excluded from CSR rankings and benchmarking exercises.

But what about a company like McDonald’s constantly under fire for its products? How does the world’s largest fast-food chain practice corporate social responsibility that is both contextual and real?

Led by Senior Manager for Corporate Social Responsibility Kathleen Bannan, who began her presentation by saying “CSR is everybody’s business,” the day-long event proved both thought-provoking (how does a company who doesn’t enjoy corporate America’s most favorable retention rates or the public’s uniform love tackle responsibility and that ever-amorphous doing the right thing?) and insightful (McDonald’s is among very few companies to institute an employee resource group for its white male workforce).

What happened today, however, was an effort at cautious transparency and an attempt at crowd sourcing corporate social responsibility.

The questions were introspective:

And the answers, alternatively useful, creative and critical.

But then I saw this:

Now McDonald’s is not the first company to host a Twitter chat by any means. I have personally attended several as well as hosted a few — including one coming up next week with UPS’ Chief Sustainability Officer Scott Wicker — with varying levels of participation from a usually diverse set of activists, journalists, executives and consumers.

I spent the last two weeks attending and speaking at the Net Impact and BSR conferences. As is typical at both conferences there is always too much to choose from and a lot to absorb. Since I cannot offer you a summary of each and every panel I attended/spoke at, here are some of the top line quotes heard at the conferences:

CSR: Always a Difference in Opinions

“CSR used to be about doing the right thing. Now it’s all about how it makes business sense.” – Campbell Soup’s VP for CSR Dave Stangis

“I hate the term CSR. It has slowed the movement and in many ways ensured that it is not built into systems, accounting, etc. I prefer [the term] sustainability although that’s not a big favorite either.” – Lynelle Cameron, Director of Sustainability, Autodesk

A bag of sweet potato fries at Burgerville in Portland, Oregon: Social messaging done right?

“CSR should be led by charity and employee engagement, not CSR departments.” – Meg Garlinghouse, Head of Employment Branding and Community, LinkedIn

“Our CEO still believes that he is the company’s chief sustainability officer. But he realized that we need to be more organized and structured in our efforts because there is a lot to be done.” – Bea Perez, Chief Sustainability Officer, Coca-Cola in response to Reverse Cause Marketing: Coca Cola’s Pursuits in the Middle East

The Role of Business in Social Enterprise

“We must see social problems as business opportunities.” – Carol Cone, EVP, Edelman

“I worked on Wall Street, driven by greed. Regardless of what anyone says, greed is not good. You get so immersed in the system you forget what all you can do with your life.” – Charles Kane, Former CEO and Board Member, One Laptop Per Child

“A lot of charities are beginning to worry that a lot of the problems they have been trying to solve are not going away. Business still tends to be more sustainable.” – Steve Andrews, CEO, SolarAid

“In the last few years, business has lost tremendous trust in the marketplace. That we are GOOD now rests on us.” – Ofra Strauss, Chairperson and former CEO, The Strauss Group

Personal Responsibility

“When you know what you’re doing is helping thousands, the payback is so much more fulfilling than any number of stock options and bonuses.” – Charles Kane, Former CEO and Board Member, One Laptop Per Child

“We need to change without giving up who we are. There are no riots against business that are profitable. We need to talk with them, not talk to them.” – Ofra Strauss, Chairperson and former CEO, The Strauss Group

“The more you peel the onion, the more you realize there is to be done. You just need to be constantly excited about peeling the onion.” – Brian Dunn, CEO, Best Buy

The Role of an MBA

“No profession exists to make the practitioners rich. There is always a higher purpose.” – Gregory Unruh, Director, Lincoln Center for Ethics, Thunderbird School of Global Management

“I don’t know if its [The MBA Oath] is going to work. But it is in the right direction and symbolizes a complete shift in mentality.” – Max Anderson, President and Cofounder, The MBA Oath

“I’m waiting to see the day when a new employee tells me they attended a class in college called Change Agent 101.” – Anonymous

Transparency

“We’re from the Midwest. We don’t advertise our initiatives. But lately there has been a shift in this thinking and our communication style. Transparency is a journey and we are in the early stages of that.” – Kate Heiny, Group Manager of Sustainability, Target

“When you are increasingly naked, fitness is not optional.” – Quoted by yours truly during a BSR panel on hyper-transparency. Citation: Macrowikinomics

Integrated Reporting

“For us, integrated reporting starts with the thinking within the company on how they will sustain their value in the future. Integrated reporting starts with integrated thinking.” – Jessica Fries, Director, International Integrated Reporting Committee

Last year marked the inaugural year for my participation in both conferences. I came back encouraged, informed and enthused about the work ahead of us. [See: Can MBA Students be Taught Humility? and The Sustainability Jobs Debate] This year – perhaps because I have been deeply immersed in the CSR space – I feel a bit bereft, despite invigorating conversations and inspiring keynotes.

Don’t get me wrong.

While the Net Impact panels once again illustrated an incredibly knowledgeable student body set to graduate in coming years, BSR attendees and speakers showcased high aspirations and a deep understanding of the complexity of issues that face us today.

Throughout the seven days, I was continually questioned: Did you learn something new? What trends have you identified from all that you have heard? And each time I thought, what’s missing? Why am I not coming up with any articulate answers? Is my brain fried or is it something else?

On Friday, finally, sitting through a six-hour flight back to the east coast, it hit me. The CSR sector had grown up.

As a receiver of information, I was among familiarity, maturity. While last year the conferences motivated and inspired, this year the conversations focused on strategies, case studies, examples, successes and failures.

As Dave Stangis, VP of CSR for Campbell Soup articulated at a panel on Blue Sky Thinking during NI11, “CSR is no longer about identifying the business case. Today, we have evolved from questioning why to answering how.”

The Net Impact panels focused on nuts and bolts, dos and don’ts, a far cry from years past. The BSR roundtables featured honest evaluations, admittance of failure, collaborative statements of success and practical tips for newcomers.

Here then, are the top five trends I observed at two of the year’s most well-attended conferences on corporate social responsibility, innovation and sustainability:

1. We LOVE Shared Value:

Michael Porter’s “creating shared value” has appealed to the corporate sector like no other concept in recent years. Not corporate social responsibility or corporate sustainability, citizenship or conscious capitalism. There seems something so potent about shared value that CSR and sustainability executives cannot stop talking about it! A year ago, they would tell me “CSR is embedded in our DNA.” Now that statement has evolved to “Our culture has always been about creating shared value.”

Point is, CSV offers us nothing more radically new than the concept of CSR. It dictates the same concept of stakeholder engagement, mutual benefits, holistic bottom lines. But it has resonated by removing the morality that responsibility instantly dictates. For CSR and sustainability executives who have to make the business case to their C-suite, creating shared value provides them with their business case.

2. Familiarity breeds contempt

I found several attendees tell me how repetitive some of the sessions were, that they didn’t learn too much that was new or revolutionary. Perhaps it was because the same folks were attending the conferences every year? Earlier this year I wrote on Forbes’ CSR blog that instead of attending the conferences every year, we should send a colleague the following year so that we can actually widen the net of information and inspiration.

This continues to hold true: Chances are, every year there will be some common denominator at these conferences. With issues like energy conservation, water scarcity, poverty, community relations and employee engagement remaining the overarching topics, why not let one of the non-converted/uneducated learn next year?

Lesser chance of you suffering from conference fatigue.

3. Where are the CSOs?

In September, Ellen Weinreb, a prominent CSR and sustainability recruiter, released a report titled CSO Back Story*. Essentially, the report tracks every executive with the title of chief sustainability officer among the U.S.’s publicly traded companies. Her research points to 29 such individuals. While it omits the many hundreds of officers holding a wide breadth of titles ranging from CSR director to VP for sustainability and social responsibility, the report pinpointed several best practices and the continuing lack of standardization on how companies define, prioritize and implement corporate responsibility.

But I digress. [See what Corporate Secretary had to say about the report or download the complete report here.]*

Point is: Only two of the 29 CSOs Weinreb identified were in attendance at BSR: Coca-Cola’s Beatrice Perez and UPS’ Scott Wicker. Both were named CSO sometime this year. Where were the others? Wasn’t the conference meant for CSR and sustainability executives to come together for three days of knowledge sharing and benchmarking? What happened this year?

While they discussed CSR and sustainability from their unique pedestal, the common denominator was the emotional connection they demonstrated with their cause, their brand, and their philosophy.

Hammond discussed how his childhood taught him the importance of play in a kid’s life. Strauss emphasized how her consumers and conflict-ridden Israel continues to teach her the right way of conducting business, of stakeholder engagement, of business being the real power in solving social problems.

Dunn on the other hand, focused on humility, responsible leadership and the importance of connecting with employees and consumers.

While last year’s speakers evinced more pragmatism, a businessman’s stoicism, this year the air held tension, an unspoken worry that things were going wrong too quickly, that we all needed to wake up. Quickly. The speakers were talking of soft – un-businesslike some would say – attributes: Social responsibility, connecting, respect, and the human condition, even destitution.

What had happened?

Let’s see: A recession that instead of leveling off, seems to be spreading across generations and countries for starters; a growing understanding that each of our actions – and inactions – impact many others in the world; a disastrous lack of trust for business; and a generational divide that seems to be holding the current decision makers accountable for their decades of excess.

Is business leadership finally waking up to their societal stakeholders?

5. Occupy Wall Street: Ignore or Engage?

Almost every keynote brought up this mass of undefined protestors that have continued to expand beyond American borders. Net Impact’s Executive Director Liz Maw opened the 2011 conference by asking attendees to “Occupy Wall Street but from within.”

Al Gore said, “Business must respond,” and that “it wasn’t a question any more.”

Ofra Strauss showed a three-minute video of the protestors equating them to civil unrest and a grassroots movement of discontent that business has to recognize and address.

At my BSR panel on hyper-transparency I brought up this commonality in one of my responses and posed a question for the audience: Will business ever think of these protestors as stakeholders? To my surprise, Jeff Mendelsohn from New Leaf Paper said that he and fellow attendees had, in fact, invited the Occupiers during a recent conference and that “The dialogue proved very productive for business and the protestors.”

That’s how KPMG’s Director of Citizenship and Diversity Lord Michael Hastings started the opening keynote at this year’s Net Impact Conference in Portland, Oregon.

In the next half an hour that followed, the former — and the first ever — CSR director of BBC offered observations that felt alternatively poignant, realistic and perhaps unattainable.

On America’s prison system:

We must recognize that social dysfunction is a critical part of our reality and is perilously expensive.

On 9/11:

I say this with the utmost respect in my heart for the victims of 9/11: It has cost us one trillion dollars and over 6,700 deaths to avenge one event. Within hours, what was supposed to be the war on illiteracy – remember the picture from that day of President Bush reading to a classroom of kids? – became the war on terror.

Today, we are facing the repercussions of that decision. Now, we must switch on our acutest sense: Our intuition and listening power.

A change in reporting is occurring that will correctly calculate the real assets of a business. Integrated reporting offers this framework for the future. We’re in a time when the idea of responsible capitalism is becoming a part of business strategy. We must continue with it.

Interesting segment of Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN with Michael Moore in the hot seat and a live town hall to discuss Occupy Wall Street. Some of the highlights that made me think:

Who is to blame for today’s mess?

MM: One hundred percent corporate America. I don’t blame the government because corporate America funds and rules the government. The politicians act as their funders ask them to so blaming D.C. isn’t going to help anyone. The root cause is corporate America.

Are the “Occupiers” against capitalism or capitalist greed?

MM: Depends on who you ask. For students, this is about the debt they have when they graduate. For the parents, it’s the mortgage they owe on a house that is worth less than half of what they owe in debt. For many others, it is unemployment, lack of affordable health care, the manipulative bank industry and so much more.

Apple has more employees in China today than domestically and in many ways the company has become emblematic with capitalism. Isn’t China at least part of the problem?

MM: Part of the problem yes but do you know how much debt a student has when he/she graduates from Peking University? Zero dollars. American students? An average of $35,000.

It all started when General Motors decided that making $4 billion in profits wasn’t enough. That they had to stretch it to $5 billion and to do so, they would have to migrate tens of thousands of jobs to China.

And guess what, if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were two entrepreneurs trying to start Apple today, they would have received no help from their local or national banks. That’s the America we are living in today.

Earlier this week I was at the annual PRSA conference in humid and beautiful Orlando, Florida. Before you think that I have switched tracks from journalism to PR, stop right there! I was on site to speak on an interestingly personal topic: Sustainability: Walking the Walk.

Sustainability: Walking the Walk with CSRWire & Ethical Markets

Joining me on the panel were CEO of CSRwire Joe Sibilia and Executive Director of Ethical Markets Rosalinda Sanquiche. Sibilia started off the panel by talking about Occupy Wall Street. Not because he wanted a room full of dissent but because for Sibilia, as he emphasized on a recent Fox Business show, OWS goes to the heart of corporate social responsibility: A responsible capitalist system that takes into account a business’ social, economic and environmental stakeholders.

From a room of roughly 45 attendees, almost everyone raised their hands. However, when he followed up by asking how many understood what the protestors are demanding, the hands fell to a single digits. So, before I go any further, here’s a two-part question for you:

Here’s the thing: Because so many continued to disagree with the holier-than-thou voice of CSR, claiming it is another cost business doesn’t need, a burden, not a business priority, so on and so forth, Michael Porter gave us an easier concept to embrace: Creating Shared Value.

You Don’t Get CSR? How About “Shared Value”?

Many more understood the economical efficacy offered by shared value than the tardy, accusatory and undefined acronym of CSR. But CSR as well as creating shared value are concepts spearheaded by economists, business leaders, researchers and activists.

Now we are all being forced to recognize and acknowledge a movement created by the average Joe (no pun intended!) demanding business to be more responsible, equal and just.

They want to be able to work, to have a home, a family. They want the right to live comfortably.

Yes, it’s one and the same thing, except now it’s not the activists or the bloggers taking up the case but an undefined mass of people who come from different backgrounds, experiences and age but are commonly united on one front: Fairness.

Regardless of whether you physically join the Occupy Wall Street protestors, it is far more important that you understand their message and recognize that this is your one chance to make things right.

Yes, You the Average Employee Can Make a Difference

As a job candidate, question the recruiter on the company’s mission, values, priorities. As a student, ask your faculty to discuss business cases in context of economic recessions, environmental degradation and social upheaval.

This is your chance to influence business as an employee, a manager, and as a prospective candidate. For the longest time we have been told to vote with our dollars. Now it is time to vote with our expertise and professional skills.